Prosodic Hierarchy-Based Templates
This chapter provides a critical evaluation of Generalized Template Theory (GTT), developed within Optimality Theory, to explain canonical morpheme shape. The central proposal of GTT is that prosodic morphemes have a restricted repertoire of prosodic shapes because they draw on the canonical shapes of a restricted repertoire of morphological categories. General theoretical principles correlate particular morphological categories (Stem, Root, Affix) with particular prosodic constituents. The central prosody-morphology correlation in this approach is between the stress foot and the morphological Stem (via the Prosodic Word in the Prosodic Hierarchy: the Stem=Prosodic Word Homology). The first two sections of this chapter define GTT and illustrate its strengths with examples showing the processes of reduplication, word minimality, templatic morphology, and hypocoristics drawn from a variety of languages. The third and final section discusses the empirical problems with the GTT, which motivate the alternative approach developed from Chapter 3.
Keywords: Generalized Template Theory, Root, Affix, Stem, Prosodic Word, prosodic-morphology correlation, Stem=Prosodic Word Homology, reduplication, word minimality, templatic morphology
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